


Somehow

by imsfire



Series: Rebelcaptain appreciation week 2019 [2]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Angst, F/M, PTSD, PTSD is a complicated business, Post-War, Recovery, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, angst with a touch of hope, couples fighting, recovery is a struggle especially when your life has been fucked up for as long as this, relationships under great stress, trying to work oneself up to accepting the need for therapy, when in the past therapy has achieved fuck-all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-09
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2020-01-07 11:49:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18410036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imsfire/pseuds/imsfire
Summary: The war is over, but for souls so deeply damaged, who have endured their pain since childhood, it's hard to move on, hard to let go of aggression and anger.  Hard to know how to begin to find peace.The morning after a quarrel with Jyn, Cassian tries to steel himself to the possibility of seeking therapy.





	Somehow

**Author's Note:**

> For Rebelcaptain Appreciation Week 2019; day two prompt, "Leap".

He could leave so easily now. 

He watches her sleeping.  She’s reverted to her old sleep position tonight, curled up on her side, one hand under the pillow.  After their fight last night, after the latest ferocious, terrified explosions of anger, Jyn had been devouring in bed, passionate and desperate.  But then in her sleep she turned away, and he’d woken in the first greyness of dawn to the tight rolled back and taut shoulders he remembered.  His own body rigid with tension beside hers.

She wouldn’t notice until morning, if he left. 

How long would it take this time, before they found words and hands-touch, and felt their way to safety again, together?  Even after this latest fight, she trusts him enough to fall asleep.  But words are another matter.  And getting past the barrier of learned instincts, past the up-surging triggered anger and into peace? - that’s beyond them both.

He wants it so much, this peace.  It seems forever to be just over the horizon.  The war in the galaxy at large is over, but the war inside Jyn, the war and the lifetime of resistance inside him, these go on and on, and each breakthrough that feels for a moment like healing is followed by more struggles, more set-backs.  It’s as if they’re still only just finding expression for all the twisted pain in their souls.  Only just finding an outlet.

And so often, it’s the same outlet; rage.  They fight and wound one another with words heavy as knuckledusters, vicious as razorblades or dragon-claws.

She’s a fury when she fights, a demon whatever the weapons, in her hand or on her lips.  Merciless, striking to the heart.

Once, when the enemy were still on a hundred worlds, marching on every street, stealing every resource, polluting every biosphere, Jyn could unleash herself on them.  Not now.  The war is over.  Is won.  No ‘troopers to beat down anymore.  She has no safe vent for the heat of her anger.

And he’s just as bad.  Cassian has been a fighter for over 25 years, a sworn-in soldier ice-bound by oath and honour for most of that time.  The tiny fragments of who Cassian Jerón Andor might have been, might once have been going to be, break through the surface of that glacier of war now, slowly, and he revolts against them.  Their smallness, frailty, their innocence, these minuscule scraps of a boy’s dreams.  Peace, nature, study, games.  Studying for the joy of it and not to complete some urgent mission.  Watching a bird singing in a tree, for no reason except the song is beautiful.  How can he become this person, now?  It terrifies him to admit such thoughts, such hopes, which can surely only invite unending hurt, when they are taken away again.

He fights himself, and Jyn fights herself, and then they fight one another.  The air turning cold as Eadu’s freezing rain with the fury of their attacks, the bladed accuracy of words.

Yet she loves him.  And Force knows, he loves her. 

Far more than simple physical need, far more than the recognition of a life of damage like his own.  He loves Jyn as he’s not loved since he was a child.  The boy who knew how to listen to the black-ice-birds singing, knew how to love like this, and this love is another tiny thread pulling Cassian back, into the desperate possibility of hope.  They rebuilt one another’s hope, and carried one another when there was no road left them but their own weakness, and their faith.  She is his peace, he is her home.

But the damage runs so deep and so sharp, every time anything moves or shifts between them, it seems to renew the wound, and cut deep, deep into their hearts.  Cassian thinks of damaged tissue, of blood vessels thick with scars.  It hurts, solidly, it stabs on every breath when she turns on him and lashes out, her anger her only defence.  It’s like having a piece of shrapnel lodged under his heart.  This heart that loves her so deeply, and wants so deeply to be able to hold on.

There has to be some avenue to healing, somehow; but whether they can find it together, before their fights tear them apart, he’s no longer sure.  It’s going to take a huge leap in the dark.  A leap to cross the coldest void of all.  Cassian isn’t sure he knows how to leap this far.

Jyn is so small beside him now, asleep, and so defenceless.  A lock of soft hair falling across her eyes.  The closed eyelids discoloured, as if bruised by sleeplessness.

He wants to tell her _We can’t go on like this, fighting like this_.  Wants to say _We deserve better than to torture each other this way_. 

To say, _I love you, I cannot bear that being with me hurts you so much, reduces you to such helplessness, such rage._

He wants too to gather her up in his arms, to gentle all her rage, wrap her in tenderness and hold her safe until there is no more pain left to scream out.

To have her hold him, the same.  Always, always, until there’s no more pain.

Her only respite has been to lash out, as long as he’s known her.  When the universe strains her too hard.  Anger is her instinctual response to pain.

And his? – stoical endurance.  In silence.

So, therapy, then.  Talking.

Neither of them will find that easy.  Jyn refuses to take it unless he does it too.  He refuses to try it again, when all through the war his periodic psych evals and bouts of “therapeutic discussion” were not merely useless but actively disruptive of his efficiency.  He couldn’t function in the field if he couldn’t compartmentalise.  And that had to be done ruthlessly, without hesitation or the smallest shadow of self-examination.

He’d let the sessions get to him once, and nearly got himself and Kay captured, next mission, his focus distracted, his pain awake and begging for attention.

And yet, he wants to break down now, wants to be able to.  For it to be true, that the therapy will help.  Wants to believe that maybe this time it could make some difference, if he went to the evaluation, and spent the required time talking, after years of ensuring his mental defences were strong enough to box-out everything but enduring the mandated sessions and getting out of them again. 

He barely slept last night.  Lay beside his lover in the dark, the lover he’d fought with, who keeps her right hand on the blaster under the pillow.  He’d seen the darkness step on the coat-tails of dawn before anything like rest had come over him.

He struggles for words so much, now that what he has to say is just for himself, not for the cause.  No-one has asked Cassian to give a report or sum up a situation, or debrief after a mission, in months.  He could talk easily, when he had clear tasks like that, when everything he said was for the rebellion.  Now his brain comes up against the fear of never getting past his past, and the anger and horror that evokes in him.  And words come hard. 

Words still come so hard for Jyn, too.  So many years she lived denying herself any kind of expression; and then for five years, like him, living only the words of the war and the cause, all her focus on that one long task that somehow must be completed.

If he goes into therapy, is there any chance that now, tongue-tied with agony as he’s become, he could manage to cut any of the pain out of himself with mere words?

Is there any chance that Jyn could?

He watches her in the warming light of day, and loves the courage and the unbreakable hope of her, the fiery need, the refusal to back down.  Loves too, the gentleness and innocence he’s seen sometimes surfacing from within her; like him, a personality coming out that has been suffocated under the ice of war for decades.  Jyn too is finding out who she may be able to be, now she can be herself and live, not merely survive and fight.

He’s fought all his life because of the breaking of that boy he’d once been, and the man that boy could have become.  He’s believed that courage and hope and refusing to give up were qualities that should be honoured and loved, that should be given their freedom and the chance to live.  He’d always believed the innocent should be allowed to be so, though his own innocence was gone beyond all remembering.  Had believed in hope, even as he lost all hope for himself. 

If he still believes in it now, then he has to believe in it for _them_.  No matter how long it takes to unearth all the layers of trauma.  No matter how many relapses, how many times one or both of them can’t make it, and rages, screams, snaps again.

He won’t give up on her, or on himself, or on them.

If they do this, and they’ll do it together if they do, he knows that much, and trusts that much; if they do this, they’ll be there for one another, if – when – if the glacier shatters, and the raw soul in pain floods through.  Each time, they’ll be there.

He touches the hair falling across Jyn’s face.  Softer than shimmer-silk and cobweb-light.  She doesn’t wake, and the vulnerability of his battle-warrior woman asleep and allowing him to touch her is a different kind of wound.  It’s agony to feel so much tenderness, but he knows it’s the light that can guide them both home.

Therapy, then.  Force; hells, it will be the very hells.  Therapy.  Everyone says it helps. 

Somehow, it will have to help him, then, and Jyn, too, though they have no words even between them, only the tears and rage, the grief, the screaming; somehow, something will have to heal them enough to move on, enough to live with who they are.  It’s the leap they have to take, the next chance, the final one that has to work somehow. 

Somehow.  No matter how long.  The war took twenty-five years from him, took his life and his love and gave him only work and pain, unceasing. 

He will not let the peace take everything he’d hoped he fought for, the new life and the possibility of love, the things undreamed-of till now. 

He strokes Jyn’s hair until the softness stills his hand, and in the morning light somehow he finds sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> I cannot bear to write them actually breaking up. But I can very easily imagine they might have had a very tough journey at times, adapting back to "normal life" after everything they've been through.


End file.
